precious liquids!!

i can keep down flat soda (which usually doesn't come up, but is relatively benign if it does), and that's about it. ugh. think i'm to start cutting the patches and see if i can find some point between pain and emesis that's acceptable.

Is it can be Snow Leopard Time Now?

Pls?? Can I has a ZFS? Or maybe I should just buy their SCSI cards and disks so I can use megaraid(8)? Or FC and XSan?

I am a sad panda.

More broken rib treatments

(note: I began composing this on 2/1. I am somewhat, but nowhere near fully, recovered, and none of has anything to do with the motorycle, other than I can't ride it right now, and it will probably be the best "therapy" for getting back in to shape)

IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR ADVICE ON DEALING WITH BROKEN RIBS, IT'S AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.

I have four broken ribs. To find which ribs on your person, take one arm, reach it up and over your head, and reach for the ear lobe on the opposite side of your head. You'll notice your rib cage sticks out. Down at the bottom, you have two tiny little ribs. They're mostly cartilage, I think, and they're pretty fragile. However, since, compared to the rest of your body, they're pretty recessed, they're not real subject to getting bashed by things. Well, I broke the lowest two ribs on both sides of my rib cage.

This does amazing things to one's mood. The pain is exquisite, and it's hard for me to sit up, lie down, reach for anything, twist, even sit on the toilet. Basically, a body at rest is more or less comfortable, but if I were to, e.g., turn over on the couch, ... well, it hurts a lot like I've got a claw tugging at my soft tissue there.

Doctors, for whatever reason, are not real good at prescribing analgesics, especially when they think of something as a subjective, soft-tissue injury. If you look at those bottom ribs, you can see they're pretty tenuous to begin with, and they don't show up so good on x-ray. Basically, you can palpate them and say "yeah, them's broken," but as I've been through numerous times here, trauma doctors just don't care about broken ribs ... or at least don't find them important enough to treat with strong palliative (I'm not saying unmonitored!) care, despite documented, successful use of morphine sulphate p.o. There are at least two good reasons for this.

The first is the morale of the patient. Broken ribs suck. A lot. I mean, there's nothing you can do. you lean in any direction, you can't cough, cleaning and cooking are out, too. You're stuck, being a vegetable, unless somebody treats your pain. With the ribs that I have broken, I find it hard to even sit up and type this (which is why it's taken almost two weeks to write this!), let alone get any work done and support myself (hah!) or my family.

So, as in the past, I've been using a (mylan, not Sandoz; the Sandoz product sucks. Avoid at all costs) fentanyl patch. Instead of one busted rib this time, though, I've got four. This time I'm on the 100-μg (microgram; ug; mcg) patch. Well, instead of pain, I have lots of vomiting. Normally such strong opiates are prescribed with iv/im smooth muscle relaxants, such as phenergan or vistaril. No such luck here; the whole point of "the patch" is that it's outpatient. Since they're not going to give me a supply of phenergan with syringes, and I can't keep the pills down, I'm left with suppositories, which people are less willing to prescribe than the damn F-patches anyways.

This is why I've been mostly a slug this last week, largely incoherent in email when you've heard from me at all, and I've "fallen asleep IM" on at least one of you (literally, fall asleep in mid-sentence with a letter being repeated until Oscar's poor little SNAC buffer gets full and spewed across the web).

One good thing has come of this, though. 5.11 Tactical, makers of  the worlds least-safe tactical knifes, produces a great shirt. They call it a "muscle mapping" shirt. Basically think of it as twice as much material as your average underarmour shirt:

 

If you notice, it's sculpted around the ribcage and shoulders. For a guy who just dislocated both his shoulders and broke his bottom two pairs of ribs, it provides incredible support for my torso. Unfortunately, the support is elasticized, so I can wear it for a few hours, kind of like a corset, and it feels great. At least, it feels a lot better than not having the support.

Anyways, it's really amazing how many hits this website gets from people looking for help with broken ribs. So these are the things you really should be doing:

1. Broken ribs create a huge incidence of depression. You must treat broken ribs aggressively including with narcotic analgesics. There are exotic treatments, such as calcium injections, and so on, but the fact that there are no simple treatments is not an excuse to not treat the symptoms: pain, lethargy, and depression.
2. Get a high-compression shirt like the above. You could go to the trouble of wrapping it with an ace bandage if you don't wan to spend the money and you don't want a washable garment (the ace bandages really aren't).
3. Be prepared for weeks of pain. If your doctor is not willing to treat you for weeks, find another doctor. 
4. A long-acting medicine, like a patch, or Oxycontin, is a much better way of treating the pain than treating it reactively (like with a percocet or vicodin). The other thing is, even with forty vicodin or percocet, you won't have enough to treat the pain for the time it takes for your ribs to heal. However, be prepared to go through detox'ing (this can be a lot worse for some people than others – just think of Trainspotting) with multi-week-long use of opiates that are "on" 24x7 (again, your physician is crucial here; the ER docs you will run into are worthless unless you have a sucking chest wound or show up with a double tall soy chai green tea latte max).
5. An anti-inflammatory, in addition to a traditional narcotic analgesic, like Relafin is also important because you have inflammation around the damaged areas. Needless to say, with anti-inflammatories, narcotics, and depression, it's probably a good idea to lay off the booze for a while.

I'm not a doctor. I just happen to break ribs frequently enough to actually, you know, have advice.  Your mileage will vary. But don't let doctors treat you like the chauvinist assholes they tend to be. This time around, the shirt was the most important thing. Seriously. I had no idea.

Heated grips have arrived

So the heated grips for the ZX7-R have arrived. It bears mentioning that it is snowing out, but I can't install said grips until this epoxy stuff arrives (would you believe I could pay $170 to have it shipped to me by 10am this morning when ordered at 1am last night? we're talking about $8 in epoxy!).

Step one, find a nice electrical lead. Step two, cut off the grips on the bike (and unbolt the bar-ends). I think I am going to try to mount the switch on the plastic air intake runners, but I'm not sure there will be enough room there. I've been thinking, you know, it's easy enough to install, maybe I could install a BMW hot plug, but then I think to myself, it's a goddamn Kawasaki, and if it was meant to be driven in the snow, it would have this stuff already.

That having been said, I did take the bike out for an hour jaunt in summer gear last night and was reminded just how cold 30F is. So, grip warmers it is.

Why is Apple the darling of the media industry?

I was theone of the first adopters. The day His Holiness said, "and there shall be a thousand songs in your pocket," I was one of the first to purchase. In fact, I purchased every single video and audio track that was remotely palatable to me because it was so goddamned cool that I could have said songs, you know, in my pocket.

Yet this morning, I have spent sixty dollars simply paying to remove the DRM from said tracks, to increase the resolution of those videos I purchased back when five gigs was, you know, a thousand songs, and I still have $580 more to spend before my library is DRM free.

I am seriously inclined to just fucking steal music from now on. Cancer of the soul Steve. You have earned cancer of the soul for bringing this foul DRM to the world and oh-so-deftly blaming Bill for it. Did I mention Bill has a sixty fucking billion dollar endowment to fight malaria in countries you're using to produce "unibody" (hint: "billet") laptops?

Go fuck a goat.

Congratulations are in order

The Electric Sistahood – and, no, I don't have ovaries, and no, I am not any more than a token – hah! see what I did there – contributor – has reached its one-thousandth post. And she is to be congratulated. That, folks, is dedication.

Mac Pro noise

Just for the record, a MacPro with four drives is substantially louder than one with just two (or one).

injuries

seriously, seriously injured my back on 1 Feb. i can hardly move. what bothers me most is that i could make an appt with any one of a number of doctors, but it's a subjective tissue injury. so, while we could alleviate the pain with a fentanyl patch for a week or two, they won't. instead, they'll be a bunch of chauvinist fucks.

here's to pain.

Bike update

Refurbishing the triple tree on the 250, adding flushed turn signals. The ZX7 is getting new body panels due to some road rash, and I might just order a set of flushed signals for it, too. I'm not really interested in "pimping my bike," but those stick-out turn signals are so easy to whack that I'm just waiting for one of them to break, again.

On the ZX7 the turns are rubber and just rest inside the fairings. When I bought it, one of these was broken, apparently as a result of careless handling of a stroller. Not one week after replacing it, $wife and I were sharing a parking space, and when we went to leave, and when she threw a leg over, her right foot smacked the signal, knocking it out of the fitting. Luckily, it just popped back in, and wasn't damaged.

The 250 is a different story. The 250's turns are harder plastic. They don't break away like the ones on the ZX7. So when I bonked the turn signal, it acted like a lever and actually cracked the fairing. The crack is about seven inches long. This was particularly shitty, as when it cracked, it revealed that the previous owner had painted over the Kawasaki green OEM paint with this black and maroon job. Only they didn't sand and primer it or anything, they just sprayed over the paint. It's really kind of a miracle the paint is still on the bike. At any rate, the flushed signals are going to be much more difficult to break off the bike. I don't think I'm going to bother replacing the fairing, as the fairing is over $500 (my guess is this is because it's a newer bike – but only by five years , and I certainly wouldn't be able to recoup that costs. Furthermore, I can't replace it with the same paint job due to the idiot painting over the OEM color. I'd really have to replace all the body panels, which would run me more than I paid for the bike.

Dangit.

So that's what you call it!

What do novels about a journey across post-apocalyptic America, a clone waitress rebelling against a future society, a world-girdling pipe of special gas keeping mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a colonisable new world of dinosaurs, and genetic engineering in a collapsed civilisation have in common?

They are all most definitely not science fiction.

Literary readers will probably recognise The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one of the sections of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood from their descriptions above. All of these novels use the tropes of what most people recognise as science fiction, but their authors or publishers have taken great pains to ensure that they are not categorised as such.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway has just had its paperback release, and is a tour-de-force of ninjas, truckers, Dr Strangelove-type military men, awe-inspiring imagery and very clever writing. It's also undeniably science fiction. Harkaway is an unrepentant fan of the genre, but his publishers William Heinemann have taken a lot of care not to market the book as such. Harkaway himself said in a recent interview: "I suppose the book does take place in the future, but not the ray-guns-and-silver-suits future. It's more like tomorrow if today was a really, really bad day."

That last line is particularly nice. I'm not going to criticize Harkaway because frankly, I haven't read the work. I just think the line is particularly misleading. Would we consider Total Recall to be Science Fiction? How about Blade Runner? It's bridging on the silly, but what about Idiocracy?

The only reason the piece irks me is it seems that they're trying ever so hard to distance themselves from Science Fiction, that plague on literature. What exactly is so horrid? (that is to say, that makes it more horrid than any other genre)

excavations

digging out from under email; been sick for a few days. sorry.

It probably makes me a communist.

And once the contract has been negotiated, the serfdom of the workers is doubly increased; or to put it better, before the contract has been negotiated, goaded by hunger, he is only potentially a serf; after it is negotiated he becomes a serf in fact. Because what merchandise has he sold to his employer? It is his labor, his personal services, the productive forces of his body, mind, and spirit that are found in him and are inseparable from his person - it is therefore himself. From then on, the employer will watch over him, either directly or by means of overseers; everyday during working hour and under controlled conditions, the employer will be the owner of his actions and movements. When he is told: "Do this," the worker is obligated to do it; or he is told: "Go there," he must go. Is this not what is called a serf?

Actually, I suppose it would make me more of an anarchist, but I'm not really a true anarchist. I'm also not an antitheist, and not even really agnostic. From my past I might consider the term "panentheist" or "enentheist," but hongwanji buddhist works equally well and doesn't disagree with either term (yes, en-en-theist). At any rate, the quote is Mikhail Bakunin. Kind of a shady character as philosophers go, but the above quote has pretty well nailed the particular stone in my sandals of late: you're fucked.

Those two words sum it up even better than Mr. Bakunin, but he of course puts it more eloquently. How am I to do anything else in my life but what I do, if I must pay to do something else, and in order to pay for it, I must do what I do? If I wish to become a painter or cement-layer, I must stop what I am doing ("computer stuffs"), learn the trade of the cement-layer or painter, and then proceed from the lowermost-ranks of either trade to the point where I've achieved income parity with where I am today. Of course, it's taken me more than a decade to get to my current income level, and I think there's room for improvement there, anyways (really, I'd rather stuff cost less than my income increase, but I know I can affect one thing and not the other).

I can't interview for positions that the square-pegs-square-holes people think I'm not capable of because I'm clearly already a Unix dweeb. What do I do? Throw the résumé out, show up at a school, cash in hand, to learn either trade? How do I finance that? Do I expect my wife to be able to sustain both of us as I transition from "being mostly fucked" to "being less fucked"? Is that reasonable?

Frankly, all those things I was taught as a child, except for very vague generalizations, have been shown wrong, one by one. Every single thing. From "college degrees mean more money" to "drugs are bad" or even "geeks are de facto not cool," they're all patently false. Those very vague generalizations – basically grouped into: don't get hurt, don't get caught, and do what makes you happy – are pretty hard to go wrong by. But if people had told me when I was fourteen that the world was basically the worst-case scenario, that I was a pessimist and hated everyone, but in reality the world was far worse than even I thought back then, I'd have corrected a number of idiotic pursuits.

Why do people persist in telling these lies to eachother, to the next generation? Stay in school, or save X% of your income, or get a good job, these are all pretty stupid. On contemplation, I have to believe that the only reason people perpetuate these lies – there, I've said it – is their abject fear that the world is not what they wish to see; the world is in fact as bad as they fear; the next generation is aided whatsoever by your attempt at procreation; telling children lies fills the empty space between their ears, as John Locke tells us, but it does not make them fitter, better, happier people. It does not build character, and the notion of "building character" itself is a fucking sham. "Character" is what other people perceive you to be, not what you are. What you are is subjective and only quantifiable from your point of view, and that point of view is exactly the opposite of relevant to anyone else. So, let's just throw the notion that one can change the way other people perceive them right the fuck out the window.

Can we move along now?

Wait, what??

thunder% ls -la

total 1092880

drwxrwx---+ 5 media staff 374 Jan 24 00:43 .

drwxr-xr-x 4 media staff 170 Nov 27 09:56 ..

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 6148 Sep 28 18:27 .DS_Store

drwxrwx---+ 4 media staff 136 Sep 20 17:55 Album Artwork

drwxrwx---+ 2 media staff 102 Oct 3 02:38 Previous iTunes Libraries

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 69782643 Jan 24 00:43 iTunes Library

-rw-rw----+ 1 media staff 2289664 Jan 22 01:14 iTunes Library Extras.itdb

-rw-rw----+ 1 media staff 433008640 Jan 22 01:32 iTunes Library Genius.itdb

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 54457482 Jan 24 00:43 iTunes Library.xml

drwxrwx---+ 1761 media staff 59908 Jan 23 20:06 iTunes Music

-rw-rw----@ 1 media staff 8 Jan 17 20:09 sentinel

thunder% file sentinel

sentinel: data

thunder% xxd sentinel

0000000: 0000 0000 0000 0000 ........

thunder%

Okay, color me confused. Apple? What the hell is this sentinel thingy? It corresponds, I suppose to my last software update. It also happens to be eight by eight bits, which is to say, sixty-four, but that's a stupid way of annotating that I've got sixty-four bit words. And since it's full of nulls, unless there's a rootkit hanging around I don't know about, it's not exactly doing anything. I know I wasn't ever drunk enough in the last week to have named something "sentinel" and filled it with nulls.

Which one of you bastards thought this was a good idea?

I couldn't have (and didn't) put it better myself.

Let's stop coddling Internet censorship as if it were an etiquette or a "children's" issue. The people suffering from being firewalled and banned aren't commercial porn-makers designed with hardcore prurient appeal — they're educators, healthcare professionals, midwives, nurses, doctors, researchers, artists, writers, filmmakers, political activists, critics and analysts— all of whom find their interest in women's lives to be shrouded in the great Internet burqa of "safeness."

Via Susie Bright, via Seth Finkelstein.

Internet burqa of "safeness." Yep, I suspect Asimov's, Analog, and friends are trying to preserve the modesty of SF/F readers with, sadly, a burqa of safeness. A Hijab of blissful ignorance. Wish I'd seen it as clearly as Susie and Seth do, rather than griping aimlessly.

the tensile strength of a man

It is trite and more than a little cliché to talk about resolutions to do one thing or another as the year counter gets incremented. I, for one, do not make such silly resolutions because I have generally forgotten about such things within hours of making them.

This year is different. I spent 2008 in what I'll call "career malaise." In 2007, I worked myself hard enough that I actually sustained a brain injury, and my doctors told me I had to chill the fuck out or my job was going to kill me. In general, I go for the jobs that are the hardest, the highest visibility, highest paid, and tightest schedules. The more danger, the better. I'm just wired that way. Think of it like base jumping, only as an engineer.

So I took a relatively sedate position with a nice organization and people I liked working with. One thing led to another, and soon the cat was out of the bag, and I was back to doing Unix administration, fixing networks, being Security Guy, and so on. For less money, even. The organization was short about one FTE, and I found myself working many 12-16 hour days. I worked weekends. It sucked, and we all know what burn out is. Yeah, I burned out. It happens to the best of us.

But I didn't burn out that job. I didn't burn out those projects or those people or that environment or the Intelligence Community, or anything like that, I lost all enthusiasm and interest in systems administration. I've got a long history of Solaris and Linux (and every other fucking *x thingie out there) administration and development, and over the years, I've had the opportunity to do some pretty amazing things. I'm incredibly grateful for that. However, I realized after a couple people said some pretty harsh things, and the way my direct management was managing me, that I was not anything special. I was not a unique and individual snowflake.

Despite the fact that I have done those incredible things, and despite the fact that I'm brighter than an autistic chimp, I've been doing worse than nothing. I was getting shit on by everyone. Nobody likes the sysadmin. He's the one who tells you he's going to torch your 30gb of britney spears music videos. He's the one that gets to tell the director that his new $37,000 server arrived bent in half because of "creative shipping." Not only did I let my career stagnate (I did not, for example, keep current on RHEL) at this "reduced brain risk" job, I let myself get walked all over, and treated like a six-year-old. In fact, I treat kids better than my management was treating me.

So I made a resolution. I will not be a fucking Unix Systems Administrator on the first of January, 2010. I just won't. Adding more years to a decade and a half of experience doesn't make me more valuable to anyone, doesn't get me more paid time off, and those pissant middle-managers are still going to be pissants. Why, then, continue to be their whipping-boy? I'm better than they are, and that's not just because I'm an elitist asshole, I'm better than they are because I can do and all they can do is watch and helplessly ask questions, trying to understand things that are just plain out of their reach.

This saddens me. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a sysadmin. My father was. I remember the PowerChallenge we had at Sequana, and how ominous it looked (I later bought one on eBay just so I could have one, and touch it). I knew I wasn't allowed to *touch* it because I was still a kid. These seasoned sysadmins, people who really knew perl well, people who could build Solaris machines and roll their own kernels, they were my heroes. I wanted to be them. And then, fifteen years later, I was them. And I learned that my heroes were being shit on by people who had no business even being allowed access to oxygen. I had worked my entire career to hit that sort of apex where I was what I wanted to be, and I found that I detested it. It frankly hurts a lot.

I had this realization and it dawned on me one day that I could just quit. I had actually forgotten that I could quit my job if I wanted to. After a particularly offensive new policy was implemented for the IT staff, I immediately typed a resignation letter, sent it to HR, my boss, his boss, and walked over to the local director of research to tell him I was leaving. As in, going downstairs, now, to the bike, here are my badges.

And it felt great. I'm on a two week contract right now doing some fun stuff that's really more pulling miracles out of thin air (it's still unix, and it's still engineering, but it's not cleaning up other people's messes). I have good days and bad days, like all of us, and I may not actually continue the contract (or be offered a continuation), but the inevitable will be put off another month, and I'll have more time to figure out what to do with my life.

My wife says to me, when I met you, you were so passionate, you were so intent, you were on fire and wanted to conquer the world. And, look, you did. And you're standing there, looking down at the wreckage, and you're unhappy. You look empty when you come home. Hey, I feel empty. There's nothing left in the tank.

Something's got to give.

Linux failure #952,701,233

There are three Linux distributions with the same name. Two of them do nearly the same thing. One of them is unrelated.

1. KOS - a now defunct Linux developed at Kent State.
2. caos - essentially a scientific computing focused, small, fast linux.
3. chaos - a really fucking minimalist linux focused on scientific computing and self-organizing clusters.

#3 is really, really cool. I use #2 at work right now, and it, too, is really cool. I haven't been able to find a copy of K/OS out there to evaluate.

je ne sais quoi

nope, you don't want to read this one, either.


I've got this song running through my head, and I haven't been able to shake it for two weeks. I have no other tracks by the duo, and frankly, I don't really know what they're saying, or trying to convey, or even if they're trying to convey anything other than the absurdity of these sorts of equations. The hook is a syrupy melody on a piano with the line I'm not unfaithul, but I'll stray. Hardly profound, and it seems kind of paradoxical.

Does anyone actually know what they mean when they use the word "love"? They know how they feel most of the time, but anyone who's been in love will confirm the downside is the closer you let someone get to you, the tighter you hold them, the deeper they can hurt you. This isn't me saying, don't go out and fall in love. I am, however, saying that some days are going to suck. Maybe even some weeks.

Polyamory has long been maligned as swinging, wife-swapping, polygamy, "hot-wifeing" (lots of nsfw there; it's essentially a seriously expanded form of cuckolding), dangerous, promiscuous, and, well, I'm out of adjectives because I'm exhausted and there are too many to recount for this particular noun anyways.

One thing polyamory has going for it (huh, is that a proper noun?) is a much broader definition of the word "love." With all this bull shit in the press about marriage being between "one man and one woman," there's no mention of whether these people should love eachother, and you can bet divorce isn't ever going to be made illegal no matter how much power those evangelical bastards grab. I would say that it's a healthier, even simpler definition. Polyamory holds that love can be a relationship between more than two people. The common example is a triad, in which three "partners" share a loving relationship. But polyamory does not define what "loving relationship" actually means. It, in its simplest form, simply means multithreaded love.

Monogamy is, by definition, the exclusive marriage of two people. The word literally does not contain any reference to love. To stretch this literal interpretation to the absurd, I am actually going to quote from the Episcopal Anglican Book of Prayer, which I am actually quite familiar with (and, yes, I am Buddhist, was married such, but please don't ask):

*Concerning the Service*

Christian marriage is a solemn and public covenant between a man and a woman in the presence of God. In the Episcopal Church it is required that one, at least, of the parties must be a baptized Christian; that the ceremony be attested by at least two witnesses; and that the marriage conform to the laws of the State and the canons of this Church.*

*[malformatted mis-ocr'd text removed]Where it is permitted by civil law that deacons may perform marriages, and no priest or bishop is available, a deacon may use the service which follows, omitting the nuptial blessing which follows The Prayers.*

*It is desirable that the Lessons from the Old Testament and the Epistles be read by lay persons.*

*In the opening exhortation (at the symbol of &N. &N.), the full names of the persons to be married are declared. Subsequently, only their Christian names are used*

Furthermore, the service itself does not mention any exclusivity, nor really comment on love:

The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.

In fact, look at that, the only mention of the word love is that of God's love for the betrothed couple. The only time exclusivity is mentioned is the phrase, forsaking all others, which appears in the vows of the husband and wife further in the service, but appears, at least to me, to have no basis anywhere else in the entire book of prayer. In fact, we are instructed by the same book to love our fellow, er, persons, our children, our God, the poor, and so on. You could look it all up on google, but a quick perusal of the phrase on blogging sites indicates I'm not the only one who has trouble with this phrase.

Stop for a second, and realize I'm not attempting to plead a case or justify infidelity in Christian, monogamous marriage. I'm not even saying the service is invalid or not useful or cast any other aspersions on it. Okay, let's continue.

So, I'm going to say that "forsaking all others" was thrown in there rather arbitrarily, because it isn't correlated with anything else, anywhere, in the service. Christian literature and dogma in particular is full of that sort of shit. Cardinal Evildoer II decided that such-and-such shouldn't have done this-or-that back in 1502 and changed the book. Who knows.

Married people can say and believe they love eachother. Why can they not love other people? If you want to exclude sex from a relationship with a child, why can you not exclude sex from a relationship with an adult? Why can one adult not simultaneously have loving feelings for two people, of any gender? In fact, do most adults not fall in love several times throughout their lives? What if they'd known all those people at once? Why is love assumed to be exclusive by monogamists? Why must others be forsaken? Don't we say that love is beautiful? Why would someone say, it is okay to love me, but it is not okay for you to love anyone else? Rather, wouldn't somebody who loved you – who by definition wants you to be happy – be overjoyed that you had found new happiness? Why do people think love is zero-sum? Is it that I love you, I love another person, and since there is only L, there's going to be a ratio between the two, so that lover 1 gets 40% of L, whereas lover 2 gets 60% of L? That doesn't even make sense. You can't quantify, and thus cannot divide meaningfully, love, nor deduce that because a person loves two people it is impossible to love them equally.

And, so, why, in a marriage, can the partners – committed to eachother by a vow of devotion in addition to love – not fall in love with other people? Adults fall in love. It's a natural process that happens in life. How can love possibly be an affront to marriage? How can someone live out their 72.5 years with, say, 40-50 of those married, and not expect to fall in love with another person at least once? The odds are unquantifiable, but I'd say that it's awfully damn close to zero.

Showing off a little

Leopard Server and storage.

Two of the disks have been anonymized to protect the innocent. Increasingly, I am getting the answer, "Yeah, I can do that," from Leopard Server where Leopard seemed to fall over. Is there a difference in the kernel or filesystem implementations? Why would it be so much more stable in the server distribution?

(close, but not quite at ten terabytes on the mac right now...)

More projects

This one I am very confused about. On the one hand, it's, for crying out loud, a 500cc Ninja. On the other hand, it's so perty:

I could probably find one in shabby shape for less than $1,500, have it repainted and faired, deck the heads and get it a nice valve job and maybe different cams (cam??), and have a real comfortable commuter. And because it's such a tiny bike it would make a really simple project. Plus, there are spares like, uh, everywhere.

But why do I want such a mundane bike? I can't seem to help myself, and I can't figure out why. Ack.

Okay, so wtf.

A recruiter has sent me an email full of ad-hominems complaining that I used the word "semen" (I think I used the phrase "semen everywhere") in a blog post. However, the post itself linked to the grey-goo scenario, and how a "money shot" could actually be interesting if the semen included micro-electromechanical machines ("MEMs"). Here's an example of a money shot there is an image following this colon, if it disappears, there is somebody in the middle removing it for you:

That's really not even that offensive. The cool thing is, if that semen was full of MEMs or other nanotechnology, the possibilities are limitless. The recruiter, however, failed to see past the NIPPLES AND THE SEMEN and decided to tell me that, maybe, if I wanted a job, I should not think such obscene thoughts (he has children, so presumably, he's ejaculated at least once).

The irony is that I was complaining about the small-mindedness of people unable to distinguish between fiction that includes sex, and fiction that is pornography or erotica.

I'd just never heard this from a recruiter before. I might be more offended if I weren't so incredibly amused by how thick he must be to miss the irony. The ad-hominems kinda had my gorge up for a bit, but then I realized that all I had to say was he didn't really even know how to use "there" "they're" and "their" appropriately, and I felt better about myself.

Here's to finding other people inferior and feeling better about yourself.

Oh, and the money shot. Girls, you know it happens. That stuff gets everywhere. Eyes, ears, hair, really. It does. Don't deny it, there's no point. Sure, be modest and don't post pictures, but please. It happens.

2009: Year of the project

I have two projects this year. The first I'll explain real quick because I don't have pictures. The second, I'll go into detail.

I have a ZX7-R. It needs new tires, but that's easy. The PO said it had a jet kit in it, but it clearly doesn't. So, it's going to get a jet kit, +5 degrees of timing, the muzzy's exhaust, and a -1/+2 sprocket change with a 520 chain. That should really make it as fast as I need for now because, my god, I fell in love with the new fireblade. I really, really, really want the new 'blade.

Yeah, it's a litre. Yeah, it's red. Yeah, it's between my legs. Red rocket, red rocket!

If money works out this year, I might pick up an 08 or 09 'blade as a commuter because the ZX7 (henceforth, "the hammer") is too brutal to commute on. But there's a huge cash outflow into the Z, which is a nice segue into our next project.

I've been talking about finally getting the Z back on the road. The assholes at the Eclipse Condominium have insisted that if you own a Datsun, it's not allowed in their garage. Well, pity the fool. What was a docile L28 82 280ZX is now becoming an RB26DETT Time Attack monster. What is time attack (for some reason, people in the US don't know this). Have a look:

So the Z, which has been dormant, more or less, a decade, is now getting a new engine, and "cleaned up" – the 26 years of road grime are coming off the car, the rusted or broken chassis members are getting replaced with new steel stock, and it's getting a new motor: an RB26DETT. So, let's start with the "what":

That's the last time I washed it. But, all goodclean things must come to an end, and here it begins:

Looks kinda sad with that motor out of there, huh. Well, let's have a look at the frame rails and make sure we can actually mount something with twice (literally) the power in there:

It actually looks pretty good. The stuff that worries me is the suspension and controls. Let's have a look:

This is basically what the steering looks like, although this image is horizontally reversed, so the steering knuckle (the dark member on the bottom) is aft. Note the bushings are a total mess.

Hey look, under all that filth and bushing leftovers, there's a sway bar!!

Getting cleaned up (parts washer, nothing special), and probably new fasteners.

That knuckle needs help, but I think a good cleaning and relubing will make it serviceable.

More quality bushings...

Steering linkage. Hopefully this is a clean-lube-and-cover job.

This is the PS pump. It's been running "dry" since 1997. Hard to move around, but hasn't had any "binding" issues. I am hoping to take those lines out (note the hex nuts), fill the housing with mobile-1, and plug them. The question is whether that will create pressure (the actual steering action), in which case, I'd have to wire it in circuit so that fluid (PSF or whatever) will flow from one side to the other. This remains to be seen.

Now here's the good news. The tranny tunnel looks great:

But there are a couple problems. The fuel distribution looks kinda jenky:

And the last bit is the frame rails under the cabin have a bit of damage (well, that's an understatement). Here's the stuff that I gotta replace:

And the steering rack is looking pretty bad. I'm hoping to clean em up, re-lube em, and add new sleeves. The metal and joints look mostly healthy.

The other side looks a little drier, but the boots are still destroyed and I gotta replace them or the whole rack.

More pictures as events warrant – bike or Z.